Tennis development is a journey and if you look at many great professional players, you will find that a parent coach was often involved in the development. Parents always have a role in tennis development and the conventional wisdom is the parent should only serve a support function. I disagree with this mindset.
Parents should educate themselves on how to play a more active role in the development of their child’s tennis skills. This doesn’t mean an exclusive role, but a supplemental role. Even parents that have zero tennis playing experience absolutely can play a role in the development of their kids, even when they become good players.
Let’s break things down to the basics here for those parents that have children just learning to sport. Assuming the kids have some decent hand eye coordination and are relatively athletic.
The basic skills in tennis are: sending skills (ball striking), receiving skills (ability to judge the ball, move and coordinate the body into a position to strike the ball). We can also break it down into some specific segments: starting the point (serving, returning, underhand feeding), rallying and finishing the point (volley’s, overheads, winners, forcing errors).
Most tennis coaches spend the bulk of the time working on just one segment, the rally skill. We focus equally on the point starting, point ending and rallying skills to create balanced players that can play the game sooner than later.
Underhand feeds is the skill that kids should be working on with parents or siblings, after all, how can you play tennis if you can’t start the point. An underhand feed has many of the foundational elements of tennis: proper grip, balance, rhythm, contact point, finish. Be sure to place targets out so the kids understand the different contact points for the different targets and so they can get used to the racquet face angle relative to their hand/palm position.
Once the underhand feed is consistently going towards the intended target, you can work on receiving drills where you hand toss to the left and the right of the player and work on their pivoting, movement, positioning and contact point with targets. This drill will be a challenge at first. Be sure to use the targets even though the players are likely going to struggle with this. They need to train their brain on what makes the ball travel on specific trajectory paths. Contact point and racquet face angle are keys to this drill. A coach can’t tell a kid specifically what the degree angle of the racquet is or what vector the racquet needs to travel. These are things repetition and trial and error will be required to train the brain.
The following drill is to help the players work on directional control. Three targets are placed on the opposite side of the net and you drop feed 3 balls on the forehand side and the player tries to hit to each third of the court.
The progression of the drill then moves to the backhand side, again 3 balls at a time to each third of the court.
The last progression is to alternate between forehand and backhand. Once the players can consistently hit to these targets from a static position, then you start feeding away from them so they have to move and hit to those same three targets.
Find Your Game 